Digital video recorders (DVRs) are electronic devices which record video in a digital format to a digital storage device, such as, but not limited to a flash drive, a memory card, a solid state drive, a hard disk drive, or other storage device, as is known in the art. Some DVRs record video to a networked storage device, which may be referred to sometimes as “cloud storage”. Cloud DVRs, or, CDVRs, typically store the video in logical pools, where the physical storage may span multiple servers (and often locations). Content recorded as a CDVR recording may be consumed on multiple user devices, at different geographical locations.
As a result of various legal and contractual scenarios, in some cases, one copy of a recorded content item per recording user needs to be maintained by the service provider in a cloud storage environment. For example, if one thousand users all record a television program broadcast at one particular time, then the service provider would need to store one thousand copies of the recorded television program in cloud storage.